Many children struggle with an inability to read well, or at all, due to uninspiring teaching methods. Combined with a lack of involvement by their parents and embarrassment at their own low skill levels for reading aloud, low success rates and failure are common. Children often lose confidence in their own ability to read and are uncomfortable trying to improve their reading capacity. For many children, the lack of comfort can be an insurmountable barrier to improving confidence in the child's own ability to read. In order to feel more comfortable when trying to learn how to read material that is beyond a child's reading capacity, the child needs to be involved in the reading material. Thus, techniques for engaging children in the subject matter of written content are needed if there is any hope to improve the child's reading. Only then will the child begin to develop self-confidence in order to tackle more challenging reading material.
One technique that is used is to offer a reward for reading. For example, classrooms employ various achievement rewards to chart the progress of children in reading. Once the child earns a reward (e.g., a star for reading material related to a lesson), the child can affix the reward to his own chart. However, these types of rewards typically do not motivate children based on the subject matter being read, but motivate based on trying to outperform other children. This is counter-productive for a struggling child who either feels uncomfortable reading aloud, or lacks confidence to do so. When some children are greatly rewarded for excelling at reading, and other children are adequately rewarded (e.g., enough reward for regular motivation), a struggling child who fails to earn many (or any) rewards of his/her own will suffer severe self-confidence issues.
Other techniques focus on negative reinforcement. For example, a progress report may indicate that a struggling child has problems with reading and needs to improve in order to be at the expected level of reading for the child's age. The struggling child in this case may feel inadequate or shameful when the child's parents are given the report from the teacher. A child in this situation can easily become turned off by reading (while still being interested in other subjects) or may disengage from the educational process entirely. However, during the course of reading when a struggling child is rewarded for reading correctly, the child's self-confidence will naturally improve irrespective of the reading abilities of other children. This would allow the child to take further steps to improve on his/her reading aloud skills.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to engage children in the subject matter of written material and offer achievable rewards for progress in learning to read.